Yonason Goldson
I'm a Talmudic scholar and professional speaker, as well as a former hitchhiker and circumnavigator, applying ancient wisdom to the challenges of the modern world. I've published seven books, including, Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for success and happiness from the wisdom of the ages.
Homepage: http://yonasongoldson.com
It Doesn’t Add Up
Posted in Israel on April 2, 2010
My friend Dave Weinbaum takes us on an important walk through Jewish history. Highlights include the following Arabic-Jewish community demographics and statistics:
- Algeria-140,000 Jews in 1948, less than 100 today.
- Yemen-55,000 Jews in 1948, less than 200 today.
- Egypt-80,000 Jews in 1948, less than 100 today. Twenty-five thousand Jews allowed to keep one suitcase each and forced to sign declaration “donating” their property to Egypt .
- Iran-100,000 Jews in 1948, 25,000 today.
- Libya-30,000 Jews before 1945, -0- today. In 1945, 140 Jews were murdered in Tripoli .
- Iraq-150,000 Jews in 1948, less than 40 today. In 1941, 180 Jews were murdered in Baghdad pogrom.
- Lebanon-30,000 Jews in 1948, less than 30 today.
- Morocco-500,000 Jews in 1948, less than 700 today.
- Syria-30,000 Jews in 1948, less than 100 today. Two-hundred homes shops and synagogues destroyed in 1947 in Aleppo .
- Tunisia-105,000 Jews in 1948, less than 1,500 today.
Jews had vibrant communities in many of these countries 2,000 years before Islam was born. Israel absorbed almost all of these homeless Jewish/Arab refugees. Currently, they and their descendents constitute over 50% of Israel ‘s population.
The value of Jewish property stolen by the above Arab/Muslim countries is $80 billion in today’s worth.
Jewish-owned land stolen by Arab/Muslim countries consists of 38,625 square miles. Israel ‘s total area is 7,992 square miles.
Yet the UN provides no compensation for these Arab/Jewish refugees and does compensate Palestinians.
And our president Obama publicly snubs Prime Minister Netanyahu in response to Israeli “intransigence.” To read the whole article, click here.
The Modern Passover Celebration — Freedom from Accountability
Posted in Holidays on March 27, 2010
After my rebuttal of an editorial slandering Moses in the St. Louis Jewish Light, the slew of letters denouncing me as uncivil and judgmental prompted me to ask why so many members of the community considered it perfectly acceptable for a congregational rabbi to denigrate Judaism’s greatest leader but unacceptable for me to call him out for character assassination and trampling on Jewish tradition.
I’m still waiting for an answer. However, one individual who frequently comments on my site (whose comments are less frequently fit to print), responded as I was certain he would:
While you may beleive that Moses was a real person many Jews believe he is a mythical character created by the Priesthood in the 7th to 9th Century before the common era.
In my comments, I replied that this is precisely the point. If you don’t believe in Jewish tradition, then anything goes. There is no reality, no morality, and no accountability.
Is this what we want to hear from our spiritual leaders?
In 2001, David Wolpe, a Los Angeles rabbinical clergyman, posed the question in his Passover sermon, “Why do we continue to commemorate the exodus from Egypt if it didn’t really happen?”
The question, of course, is self-contradictory: We celebrate the exodus for no reason other than because it did happen; and if we don’t believe it happened, we have no reason to celebrate.
If the Torah is nothing more than a book of fables or inspired literature, then certainly any Bible critic is entitled to his own interpretations, as any critic of literature is entitled his own interpretation of Shakespeare or Milton. (Then again, one requires credentials as a literary scholar before his criticism will be respected by his peers.) However, if that is what we believe, then the foundations of Judaism have already disintegrated and we have no hope of restoring them.
Conversely, there is ample evidence supporting the truth of Torah and its historical record for anyone who wants to seek out historical truth. The overwhelming majority of those who dismiss the Torah as myth have made no sincere effort to discover otherwise. It’s difficult to take seriously the opinion of anyone who hasn’t bothered to understand the opposing point of view.
Historical revisionism has become possibly the greatest enemy of the Jewish people. The historical imperative of the exodus and revelation at Sinai is at the core of who we are as a people, as well as defining the essence of the Passover celebration. For more on the dangers of revisionist history, see my article from last week, Orwell, Santayana, and Me.
For past Pesach articles, click here.
May the Almighty grant us all a joyous and kosher Passover, and a true redemption from the slavery of our biases and misconceptions.
Krauthammer on Israel
Posted in Israel on March 24, 2010
“Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace — literally dying for peace — since 1947, when they accepted the U.N. partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.)
“Israel made peace offers in 1967, 1978 and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis. Why, Clinton’s own husband testifies to the remarkably courageous and visionary peace offer made in his presence by Ehud Barak (now Netanyahu’s defense minister) at the 2000 Camp David talks. Arafat rejected it. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered equally generous terms to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Refused again.”
Paved with Good Intentions?
Posted in Israel on March 22, 2010
What does Barack Obama think he’s doing with his Israel policy?
What does Obama want from Israel?
Posted in Israel on March 21, 2010
From Jewish World Review, by Caroline Glick:
Obama’s ultimatum makes clear that mediating peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a goal he is interested in achieving.
Obama’s new demands follow the months of American pressure that eventually coerced Netanyahu into announcing both his support for a Palestinian state and a ten month ban on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria. No previous Israeli government had ever been asked to make the latter concession.
Netanyahu was led to believe that in return for these concessions Obama would begin behaving like the credible mediator his predecessors were. But instead of acting like his predecessors, Obama has behaved like the Palestinians. Rather than reward Netanyahu for taking a risk for peace, in the model of Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, Obama has pocketed Netanyahu’s concessions and escalated his demands. This is not the behavior of a mediator. This is the behavior of an adversary.
With the US President treating Israel like an enemy, the Palestinians have no reason to agree to sit down and negotiate. Indeed, they have no choice but to declare war.
And so, in the wake of Obama’s onslaught on Israel’s right to Jerusalem, Palestinian incitement against Israel and Jews has risen to levels not seen since the outbreak of the last terror war in September 2000. And just as night follows day, that incitement has led to violence. This week’s Arab riots from Jerusalem to Jaffa, and the renewed rocket offensive from Gaza are directly related to Obama’s malicious attacks on Israel.
But if his campaign against Israel wasn’t driven by a presidential temper tantrum, and it isn’t aimed at promoting peace what explains it? What is Obama trying to accomplish?
There are five explanations for Obama’s behavior. And they are not mutually exclusive.
Read the whole article by clicking here.
The Sunset of Human Compassion
Posted in Culture on March 18, 2010
Back in the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out his now infamous experiment at Yale University, in which he demonstrated the kind of submission to authority that could produce the Holocaust, or any other form of genocide. Now French national television has turned his experiment into a reality show.
In the documentary “The Game of Death,” French contestants were encouraged by an authority figure to administer lethally dangerous electric shocks to another contestant — actually an actor playing the part of a helpless victim. With every wrong answer from his fellow contestant, the punisher would raise the voltage level in order to win the game.
As the “contestant,” strapped into a booth and hooked to electrodes, appeared to writhe in pain and beg for mercy, the studio audience chanted “Punishment! Punishment!” If we have ever wondered how ordinary Germans could have tacitly endorsed the wanton cruelty of Nazi camp guards, we needn’t look much further for an answer.
A friend of mine once told me the story of how, as a yeshiva boy some decades ago, he had been watching his classmates play a game of basketball. One of his teachers, an old-world European rabbi, came along side him to watch the game. After several minutes the rabbi said, “I don’t understand. This one wants the ball. Why doesn’t the other one give it to him.”
My friend answered with teenage innocence: “Rebbe, it’s a game.”
The rabbi’s eyes widened. “A game?” he asked. “It’s a game to keep something away from someone who wants it! What kind of game is that?”
What passes for entertainment reveals much about the values of society. In a few decades we’ve gone from competition to exhibitionism to sadism. It’s too frightening to contemplate where we’ll go next.
The Dangers of Historical Revisionism
I can’t say that I am surprised over the reactions to my recent article in the St. Louis Jewish Light rebutting a local rabbi’s remarks about Moses. In retrospect, I should have realized that many readers would misinterpret my passion as personal or as politically motivated. I regret that, by not taking a softer tone, I left many unable to coolly evaluate the substance of my argument.
I should clarify that I was writing as an individual, not as a representative of or in coordination with any other authority or institution. I should clarify further that, as I believe my students will attest, one of my major themes as a classroom teacher is the primacy of respect for all people who aspire to uphold standards of ethics and morality and for all beliefs that set such standards. If, by expressing my indignation at a public demonstration of disrespect, I crossed over the boundaries of respectfulness myself, that only proves that I still have much to learn, even from my own lessons.
Having said that, I must also reiterate my distress that the same objections to my criticism were not raised in response to my colleague’s denigration of Moses. Why the double standard? Why is one verbal attack so much less tolerable than the other?
A broader investigation of the topic can be found here.
Objection!
Posted in Culture, Jewish Unity on March 10, 2010
Apparently, many in the broader Jewish community have taken exception to my rebuttal of Carnie Rose’s article, in which he defames the character of Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses).
I don’t have to wonder how the general readership of the Jewish Light would have responded had an editorial been run condemning Martin Luther King for infidelity. Would not the Jewish community have responded with justifiable outrage? Would not leaders and layman alike have — correctly and properly — vilified the editorialist for needlessly smearing America’s most iconic civil rights leader and obscuring the greater issue of the continuing battle for civic justice?
Why then, was there not a whisper of discontent when Rabbi Rose concocted imagined criticism of Moshe the Lawgiver’s personal conduct? Is the Jewish community so conflicted that its commitment to anti-defamation does not extend to the greatest of Jewish luminaries? Could Rabbi Rose not have found a single source in all Torah literature from which to teach the importance of sensitivity to family members without engaging in baseless slander? And why have I been compared to a member of the Ku Klux Klan for calling him out for his defamatory remarks?
The immediate object[ive] is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people.
This quote is taken from the mission statement of the anti-defamation league. Whatever comments I made about Rabbi Rose’s article were consistent with that mission, both warranted and defensible in light of his profoundly and needlessly offensive remarks. I take it as a disturbing sign of the moral confusion of our times that the same Jewish notables who have condemned me for defending the honor of Judaism’s greatest hero expressed not the slightest concern over Rabbi Rose’s wholesale denigration of Moses, a figure far greater and more significant than either Rabbi Rose or myself.
The End of Exile
Posted in Culture on March 10, 2010
In his prophetic dream described in the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar foresaw the four kingdoms that would rule the Jewish people: Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome — each with its own distinct character, each posing its own unique threat to Jewish survival.
The final exile, that of Edom (Rome) manifests in our time as the superficiality of Western Civilization, distorting universal values based in Torah until they become gross caricatures whereby all attempts at moral reasoning yield perversely immoral conclusions.
Case in point: the latest from Paul Greenberg.
Torah Ideals 
Recent Comments